She thought she could recover back home at her 100-year-old farmhouse in Jefferson Township, but it now was clear she needed to go to the hospital – immediately.
“That’s the last thing I remember – leaving our farm driveway for Kettering Hospital – until the second week of February,” she said in late May in a voice much raspier than it is now.
Her seven missing weeks are something her family, the medical staff who treated her and especially her UD family will never forget.
“I was there when she was admitted to the COVID ICU,” Dr. Esteban Arevalo Caro later wrote to her family. “The virus started to kill her lungs very soon. She was significantly worse every day, actually every hour.”
Her daughter, Emily Aldredge, said her mom was told she had a 5-percent chance of survival.
She ended up on a ventilator for five-and-a-half weeks and in a medically-induced coma.
She contracted double pneumonia, had a blood infection and got, as Waltz put it, “every other bad thing that comes with COVID.”
Aldredge said her mom nearly died twice.
Everyone else in her COVID unit did die, Waltz said she was told by a doctor.
In early January her husband, Dale, drove to the hospital to say a final goodbye.
And that brings us to the late-morning occurrence of Jan. 7 that UD women’s basketball head coach Shauna Green – voicing the sentiments of so many in the Flyer family – now calls “a complete miracle.”
Neil Sullivan, UD’s vice president and director of athletics, agrees: “It was probably the most powerful thing I have been a part of in my 15 years working here. It was truly amazing.”
On the evening of Jan. 6, Green contacted Sullivan and told him Waltz’s condition had so badly deteriorated that her husband was collecting information for her obituary. And he wanted UD to know ‘this hadn’t been a job for her, it was a labor of love.” Because her mom had shown no improvement, Aldredge said some doctors – but not Arevalo, who had become Waltz’s staunchest supporter – suggested it was time to change her coding. If she were moved to “do-not-resuscitate – comfort care,” she could be taken off the ventilator.
Sullivan mulled over what he was hearing, and an hour later he said he felt he had to do something:
“We’re a Catholic, a Christian school, and we believe in the power of prayer…Sometimes God is the last place we go to, and he should be the first.”
‘UD family had her back’
Sullivan sent an email out to the entire athletic department, inviting people to take part in a voluntary prayer offering the next morning, via Zoom, for Waltz who was battling “serious illness related to COVID-19.”
He didn’t confide that she was at death’s door, but word quickly spread.
Unbeknownst to them, Aldredge was “super distraught” the night of Jan. 6, she said, because, like the rest of the family – Waltz has four daughters in her extended family, eight grandchildren and three great grandkids – she had been unable to see her mom in person since Waltz had been admitted to the hospital.
That’s when Aldredge took the advice of a friend who said “Your mom needs to hear your voice. You need to call her.”
Aldredge first thought of all the reasons that wouldn’t work: Her mom was in a coma. The nurses already were overwhelmed with tasks on the COVID-19 ward. She herself might start crying on the call and make things worse.
Then she thought of the VoiceOver app on her phone, and how that enabled her to perfect a message that was part pep talk, part plea: “You’re doing great, Mom! We just need you to pull out Super Mom now.” The nurses loved the effort and played it for her mother on a couple of occasions.
Almost instantly, Waltz’s ventilator numbers got better. Even the doctors were stunned.
So the next morning, as Sullivan was preparing to lead what he planned to be an in-house Zoom call, he was informed of a last-minute change in plans. He said “God intervened,” though the heavenly duties were carried out by his executive assistant Debbie Seaman and Waltz’s middle daughter, Holly Driscoll, a travelling nurse who lives in Kettering. The pair worked in conjunction with the Kettering Hospital nurses to get the Zoom call piped live into her mom’s room.
“It took on a whole different tenor then,” Sullivan said. “It was divinely inspired.” He said it also became “a very Dayton moment.”
“I’m not a theologian,” Sullivan said, “but I said I would start it off and then anybody else could join in with their prayers or remembrances or whatever they felt.
“I figured a few people would take part, but the next morning there were dozens and dozens of people joining in.” Some 65 people joined the call and, one after another, coaches, staffers, administrators and friends told “Miss Linda” what she meant to them, how they loved her and how they needed her back.
“She was sedated, but we believe she could hear,” Sullivan said. “It was the power of prayer. It was a God thing.”
Her numbers continued to improve, and she took a dramatic turn for the better.
After that, Aldredge – with the help of Beth Flach, the academic coordinator for UD student athletes – urged people to send more audio messages to her mom. She got 55.
“The UD family had her back,” Aldredge said.
UD president Eric F. Spina contacted her twice and dozens of players reached out, from alumnae Christi Hester Mack, Kayla Moses, Sam MacKay and Andrea Hoover to current Flyers like Erin Whalen and Araion “A.B.” Bradshaw.
“They said, ‘You were like our mom away from home. You treated us like we were your daughters and now it’s our turn to look out for you,’” recalled Aldredge.
When Waltz was finally moving to the post-acute medical facility at Sycamore Hospital, the UD family – at Seaman’s prompting – filled her room with flowers, teddy bears and cards.
And when she finally was released on March 1, the UD family surprised her with a drive-by parade – 18 cars, many decorated with streamers and signs – past her 14-acre farm just west of Dayton.
‘I was home, I was alive’
Although she has undergone physical, occupational and voice therapy and continues to deal with what she said are the afflictions that COVID long-haulers endure – she has a growth on a heart valve that may require open heart surgery; her lungs were scarred, she must use portable oxygen, she still tires easily; has leg cramps at night and bouts of dizziness – she has been improving.
By late May she’d even begun mowing her large yard on a riding mower in 60-inch swaths.
“It just felt so good, being outside with the sun on my face,” she said. “I was home. I was alive!”
That Darth Vader voice Aldredge heard when her mom was on a positive airway pressure machine in the hospital is gone, replaced by just a minor breathiness when she speaks.
Although Waltz said she lost much of her hair from the trauma, she has taken to wearing it in a stylish pixie cut. It’s part of a new look that has come with losing 42 pounds in the ordeal.
“A.B told me, ‘Miss Linda, you look great,’” Waltz laughed. “I said, ‘Yeah, it’s called the COVID diet. I wouldn’t recommend it.’” Waltz felt well enough in May that Aldredge took her on a one-day, whirlwind, thank you tour. She had lunch in Centerville with nine of the nurses who cared for her in the COVID-19 ICU.
Those nurses had gotten to know her and her family through the systematic check-ins Aldredge, her sister Holly and their aunt and uncle, Sandy and Bob Porter, made each day. It was their only alternative since COVID -19 rules prevented families from coming into the hospital.
“We called three times a day,” Aldredge said. “My aunt and uncle would call early in the morning, around 6 or 7, before shift changes, and then my sister would call in the afternoon after my mom’s labs were back. Since I’m out in L.A., I would call late at night.
“Mom was in a coma and couldn’t speak for herself. We advocated for her and humanized her and we supported the nurses caring for her, too. We built a relationship and it was good for all of us.”
That’s why the face-to-face meeting last May meant so much.
“There were a lot of tears,” Aldredge said. “They told my mom, ‘We needed you as much as you needed us. We were around so much death. We needed to see somebody survive. We needed to see your will, your spirit and the way your family and everyone supported you and loved you so much.’”
Waltz also had coffee with Arevalo, the medical resident from Chile who had tried to convince everyone not to give up on her because he could tell – by the squeeze of her hand, the faint sound he’d heard in her damaged lungs – that she still was fighting.
That day she paid a surprise visit to the women’s basketball offices at UD, as well.
No one was more warmed to see her than Green, who’d convinced her to stay on five years ago after Jim Jabir left the head coaching job. He was the third head coach Waltz had worked for and she’d said she planned to retire when he left.
“She’s kind of the mom of the whole program,” Green said after that visit. “She takes care of our kids, and really, she spoils all of us. She knows how to get everything done here. She’s an integral piece of the program and the basketball family.
“Everyone loves her and wants her back.”
And in the first week of August, Waltz – who initially had talked about returning by December – showed up at basketball offices, ready to resume work on a limited basis.
She now comes in twice a week – every Tuesday and Thursday – for four hours at a time. She hopes to expand that as her health permits.
Already word has spread through the Flyers’ basketball community and, a week ago, Sam MacKay – a heady guard on four straight NCAA Tournament teams who graduated from UD in 2013 and now is a well-travelled pro – surprised Waltz with a visit before returning to Greece to play.
“I just cried when I saw her,” Waltz said. “She’s just so good-hearted.
“She left me a couple of good messages while I was in the hospital and the other day she showed me the shoes she wore last season. She’d written ‘Miss Linda’ on them and she said she plans to do it again this season.”
Green said while she knows Waltz’s return is “good for her mental well-being,” she said the Flyers’ players, coaches and staff benefit, too:
“Just her presence around the girls, it feels back to normal. Everyone smiles when they see her and they give her hugs. She makes everyone feel a lot better.”
Waltz said being around the women’s basketball program is “the best medicine I can ask for.”
She reiterated what she has said before:
“I know I’m very lucky to be here and a lot of it has to do with the love and prayers I got from everyone at UD. I do believe that prayer call is one of the biggest reasons I’m sitting here today.
“People need to believe in prayer.”
She said they also need to believe in the COVID-19 vaccines:
“I urge people to get vaccinated, especially older people who aren’t vaccinated. This virus – and now the Delta variant that’s spreading everywhere – it can take your life in a week. I know. COVID nearly took my life, but there’s a reason I survived.
“God has something else in mind for me. My job isn’t done. I don’t know what it is, but when it comes to me, I’ll know.”
Folks at UD think they already do.
She’s a walking miracle.
For them, she’s a living reminder of the power of prayer, the power of community and a time when UD was at its very best.
This column originally appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of the University of Dayton Magazine. It has been updated and expanded.
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